Get your filthy paws off my fundamental human rights.

This is not a #youknowme 1 in 4 story. I’ve never been pregnant. Never will be. My abstinence, timing, contraceptives or luck weren’t what prevented drama and hard decisions. My inhospitable womb is responsible.

Despite how much I desperately wanted to get pregnant I fiercely defend abortion as a fundamental human right and categorise it as healthcare.

No-one should be legally compelled to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. No-one should be forced to continue a pregnancy with the knowledge that their child will be born to die or be profoundly impaired. No-one should be compelled to play Russian-roulette with their physical or mental health in the hope that everything will be ok when all medical evidence and experience suggests otherwise.

Individuals must be given the agency and ability to make the hard, heartbreaking and life altering choices than any pregnancy can bring.

I was pro-choice as a teenager comforting my 15 year old friend who’s mother gave her no option but the termination. I was pro-choice in my 20’s when I accompanied another friend to a clinic and tucked her safely into a blanket fort to heal. But it’s in my 30’s that I’ve become confident and unashamed to shout that I am pro-choice.

Partially, because I am witnessing and navigating the long lasting impact and damage of inadequate early years care. My eldest daughter is massively affected. Read up on attachment disorder and containment theory and then bear in mind that we believe that this damage was inflicted while my daughter was within foster care.

This propaganda of utilising unwilling individuals as incubators before handing babies over to a fit for purpose system, which is caring and nurturing is bullshit. So called pro-lifers aren’t concerned about the life of any children.

On the 31st of July 2018 there were 14,738 looked after children in Scotland. 2% of Scottish children. Looked after is the official terminology used by Scotland’s national and local government bodies to describe children and young people in the care of the local authority.

Even with legalised abortion our services are in crisis, desperate for more foster and adoptive carers for vulnerable children and young people.

I would be really interested to see how many of these so called pro-lifers are doing the training, checks and opening their homes to the children who are in desperate need.

How many are out there campaigning for vastly improved sex education, free and easy access to contraception and engaging with the parents of these teens? All proven to reduce rates of teenage pregnancies.

How many are supporting rape crisis centres, refuges, child poverty charities, campaigning against the governments austerity cuts and educating themselves about the myriad of mystery that having a womb can entail.

How can you claim to be pro-life when there is a wealth of evidence that prohibiting abortion kills women?

My personal option is that a foetus is not a life. Life is something which is completely in the power of the individual carrying that foetus. When that individual acknowledges and accepts that they are forever beholden to that wee bundle of cells. For some that will be the instant a test confirms their suspicions. For others there was no life, no baby, nothing but the abject horror of possibility.

I’m pro the life of that teenager violated by a family member.

Pro the life of the desperate mother who has just been given an incompatible with life diagnosis on a much wanted and already much loved child.

Pro the life of my friend who ‘thinks’ that they used a condom on a drunken one night stand. Who absolutely can’t have a baby 2 years out of university and in the very early stages of launching a stratospheric career.

Pro the life of the already beaten mother who can’t afford or face the idea of adding another child to her burden.

I celebrated when the Republic of Ireland repealed the 8th. Now I’m badgering my MP to stand with Northern Ireland and making sure that he knows that I won’t allow the UK government to continue to breach it’s international human rights obligations. The link is here if you agree with the United Nations that the rights of NI women and girls are being violated and want to ask your MP what they are doing about it.